lol no
read solzhenitsyn and then get back to me
Capitalism is a subset of a larger idea of who can and does kill who the best. Communist tribes were murdered by us. They were perfect. Absolutely perfect. They just couldn’t kill people better. So, I guess not perfect.
In other words, what if capitalism [here and now], really is the best of all possible worlds?
You know, your political prejudices or mine notwithstanding. 
K: I have read Solzhenitsyn, what a boring book, but that doesn’t change
what I wrote about Lenin and Stalin using Marxism as an excuse for
a dictatorship… communism as practiced by the soviet Union had
nothing to do with what Marx wrote… it was an exercise in naked power
by Lenin and Stalin…
Kropotkin
there is no such thing as absolutely perfect society
the noble savage is a myth
closest you get is a society composed of a single family
coincidentally, as close to an ant society as you can get with humans, as they share the same genes (since that subject is fresh)
and i don’t need to tell anyone how fucking hard it is to keep a family together
also pretty sure the commies kicked america’s ass in nan
and then after the americans fucked off vietnan collapsed by itself under communist rule
like every other communist society
because it’s a stupid fucking idea
The Arawak tribe that Columbus found were all naked, their tribe was such that when someone invented something, it was buried with them. Totally different than eastern or western cultures. Columbus murdered 3 million of them. They are extinct.
yes it fucking does as clearly shown by solzhenitsyn in his book
he documented how the creation of laws in the soviet union was fundamented upon marxist thought
therefore showing a causal relationship from marx to the gulags, to the mass murders
so read again maybe, with your eyes open
there’s also the hard-to-swallow pill that there was no stalin in china, in cambodia, cuba, vietnan, north korea, venezuela…
so do you want to make an argument that every single marxist based society that has ever existed was an anomaly?
every single one of them by doing it wrong arrived at the same results?
well that’s pretty fucking stupid if you ask me
like
they could have used all of these inventions to let the next generations build upon them
for thousands of years
so by the time columbus got here they could just like vaporize him with their high tech lasers
so maybe they went extinct because they were stupid
by the way kropopo I am a fan of your random line breaks
strong post craft
i like taking breaks in my sentences too
feels natural
just like talking
with the added benefit
of making everything you write
seem deep
like a poem
go in peace
Should they have been murdered for it though? No.
There’s a story from one of the journals of the Columbus expedition that a small child walked up with a bird in her hands and offered it as a gift to them… one man drew two swords and decapitated her.
K: No, as I have pointed out, Lenin and Stalin used an economic theory to derive
a political theory, that is asking for failure… and as far as the laws go, we can make
the laws be anything we want… the pretense of Leninism and Stalinism is that they
were based upon the historical necessity of Marxism, the dialectical materialism…
when in fact, these were simply an excuse for Lenin and Stalin to have a political
dictatorship… that was the agenda, not to advance Marxism but to advance
Leninism and Stalinism which is fancy dressed up dictatorship with the
dressing being Marxism…Lenin but especially Stalin was about power,
the raw exercise of power… Marxism was his means to reach power, but
it wasn’t what he believed in, he believed in power and his being a dictator…
as for the other examples, look at them, look at them clearly…
every single country you suggested was a dictatorship, without fail…
Marxism was the goal to power, but power and being a dictator was
the point of each of these leaders of each country…take Cuba for example,
the point wasn’t being a Marxist country, the point for Castro was being
dictator… and marxism was his tool to becoming a dictator…
and the same goes for China and Vietnam and Cambodia and every
other country you listed… the goal wasn’t creating a marxist state,
but creating a dictatorship for the person in question…Mao, Castro,
Pol Pot, Kim Jong IL… all were about the dictatorship and not
about Marxism which is to repeat, an economic system, not a political
system…
you keep making the mistake that Marxism is an political
system and it isn’t… it is an economic system… nothing more,
nothing less…
Kropotkin
K: I have a couple of writing tendencies… one is to make much
too long paragraphs and I tend to write very long extended sentences…
so to avoid those tendencies, I find it best to write short sentences
and avoid paragraphs… it forces me to be much clearer
in my writing then I would normally be…
and that is the point of writing, to be clear and concise
and this fashion of writing does that for me…
Kropotkin
Of course. “Put something valuable together → get rewarded” is just how it should be, but don’t stop so short of the whole picture!
Get rewarded by how much? For example.
How much more has an employer really “put together that is clever” than their employees? I refuse to play down the value of business founders - we need people like that. People who know how to get a business started are necessary.
But on the other end of this wide spectrum, to build on what I was saying to Wendy about Jeff Bezos who gets 10 million times what so many of his employees get “at the bottom”:
How much work really is “10 million times more” than some full time hard worker at the bottom?
Put it this way: could Jeff do the work of 10 million warehouse lackeys? 
Would 10 million warehouse lackeys really fail to do the work of one man? Would it have been impossible for all 10 million to have set up an online bookstore between themselves, given the resources and experience Jeff had when he founded Amazon? Would it have been impossible for 10 million people together to hire the same people Jeff hired to turn it into what it is today?
For cases like Elon Musk and Bill Gates there’s maybe a case for saying their skills are 1 in 10 million - perhaps even rarer than that - especially at the point in history when they began setting up what they built into the huge businesses they own today. But even for them, does that mean they are literally “10 million times more” than any random unskilled wage labourer? Does an exceptionally rare skill set really necessitate THAT much of a reward? But even they aren’t as rich as Jeff, who started his company with the skill to sell books…
To put things in perspective, it’s probably perfectly possible for a really hard worker to do the work of 10 regular people. Even this would be tough on a purely level playing field though - e.g. literally consistently inputting 10 times as many commands into a computer per unit of time than 10 average people. Even in film, at least if the intention is to go for a believable degree of realism, you’re rarely going to have the main protagonist out-compete more than 10 people who are working together simultaneously. Maybe they might defeat much more than 10 over the course of the whole film, but not all at once on a level playing field unless there’s a fantasy element involved.
Could a person do the work of 100 people? Well, if they were all really lazy, probably - and I mean all of them and really lazy. One person alone could certainly come up with a way to get work done 100 times more efficiently, for sure. Mind you, it takes the work of many exceptional people together to come up with the kinds of technologies we use today, so that’s not really comparable. There comes a point where significant advancements in work techniques and technologies are only really possible through cooperation and a division of labour. The amount of work that goes into building a complex that can produce computer processors is astonishing, for example.
How about doing 1000 times more work than someone? That’s a lot of fucking work, but lets say a really smart person has a great education, invents some really awesome shit all by themselves and simultaneously absolutely flies through any and all the menial tasks like a superhuman, compared to a regular joe working in a warehouse… MAYBE, maybe someone out there could pull off 1000 times more work than someone else…
10,000 times more? 10 MILLION times more?
Yay for the rewarding of valuable stuff - absolutely, but c’mon… there’s a sense-check to perform here.
Exactly right.
Just as you described in your opening post, the comments you talk about continue to be made all the same.
He was right for a couple of sentences in his first post, but then just threw it all away…
To what extent and in what ways were all these places doing the exact same thing in the exact same way? I mean specifically, of course - it’s really easy to gloss over the whole thing with generalities and take as fact that all these people were implementing what they said they were implementing.
What’s to stop us saying that all of these were undeveloped countries emerging from a particularly awful situation - enough to warrant change into what they subsequently all became known for - and that’s why they failed?
Was their superficial association with a certain kind of political system the ONLY factor at play here? - that’s all I’m saying.
Economics is far from a natural science as it is - never mind when it’s filtered through politics, partial perspectives, and powerful opposition.
It’s simply not enough work to dismiss the whole thing as “oh, I guess Marxism just doesn’t work, can’t work, and necessarily results in atrocities”.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely not okay to play around with what may in fact turn out to be objectively terrible - but to pretend like the jury is out, and the science is in, is just misguided to the extreme.
Do we even know in the slightest what would happen if Marxism was applied to late-stage Capitalism - as literally according to Marx’s Historical Materialism that explained how societies had to first go through Capitalism first in order to then become Socialist and so on from there?
I mean, honestly, how much do “china, in cambodia, cuba, vietnan, north korea, venezuela” fit Marxism according to his writings about that? 
It’s obviously a far harder pill to swallow to actually learn about Marxism before dismissing it in the same old cliché ways. That’s exactly what this thread is about, but apparently it doesn’t stop people from flocking to prove his whole point…
Marx predicted socialism arriving historically as a result of the industrial revolution in capitalist nations. Instead, it was attempted in Tsarist Russia and in basically agrarian, peasant cultures.
And in capitalist nations, I don’t think he anticipated the welfare state, the middle class, the rise of unions for some privileged sectors of the working class. Let alone the global economy as we know it today.
The real world being considerably more complicated that anything derived from a manifesto. However scientific it may have been in exposing the nature of political economy down though the ages.
And, come on, when push comes to shove, dialectical materialism aside, he was an objectivist.
that’s the problem with a theory
you gotta implement it
and then you run into small setbacks such as the laws of fucking nature
and I can try and write down here how a democratic marxist society would work
but you’d tell me I bastardized it because I think the whole thing is fucking stupid and you may be right about that
then you’d say it’s a strawman and get all pissy about it
so why don’t you tell me, yourself
how that’d work
i promise I’ll study it with lurv
Sil you’re making it it very difficult for me to casually engage in banter here in the middle of my work day by typing entirely too many fucking words man
but fuck it, I’ll read it
fuck
my answer to that always is that it’s none of your fucking business, worry about yours
if you’re not happy with the amount you’re being paid, fucking quit!
when you’re getting a job, ask the amount you want
if you can’t get what you want, get better
life is a constant moving from a shit position to a less shit position
that’s a good thing
well they’re also the ones taking in all the risk so that’s why everyone in the planet isn’t an entrepreneur
yeah it would have been impossible for 10 million people to do that job
because there isn’t an equal distribution of intelligence, industriousness, creativeness, courage, conscientiousness
as you know well the pareto principle applies to all that
9 million of them would be doing fuck all
why does it have to mean that?
it work by the rules of a market
if bezos took 100% of the company profits and offered his employees a salary of zero, he’d quickly be off the market
his game is to offer as little as people will possibly take
and they take it
amazon does not run on forced labor camps
also
bezos was vice-president of an investment firm before he quit that job to start amazon
without getting into the massive balls it took to make that move as an individual
how can you say that his distinguishing skill was to sell books lol be honest dude
it’s not only possible
it’s what happens
you’ve done the math
that would be the case if the 9 other people were also typing as hard as they can
but they’re actually doing fuck all
having 10 people in a room all working equally as hard as they can
now that’s some fucking fantasy element for ya.
again why does it have to be an argument of whether or not he is doing work to warrant that salary?
it’s his fucking money!
back off his junk
if you’re not happy with your lot in life
try to work on making it better
we oughta be learning from those people
it is no wonder everyone in the world isn’t a millionaire
resentment is a shitty fucking feeling that only weak people dwell on
me personally, when I feel like something is not fair, I suck it up and work harder
yeah, sense check
how much money some other person makes should matter exactly nothing to you
work for an amount that you find fair
the end
will do part two later, i got toys to deliver.
my time is sold out to clients at $300/hour
I… don’t make $300/h
BUT
I make per hour exactly the amount I asked
it’s great
I even get to ask for more whenever I want
AND I can quit if they say no!
I can even play them one against another and say someone else offered me more
craaazy
That’s great and all, prom, but not all Contractors succeed, especially private contractors. You know this fact too… lots of laborers are just wastes of space.
Like fucking up the measure of an entire house. There are good contractors and bad, good laborers and bad, and the market takes care of the rest, not The State.
Its called natural selection.